Nick Makanna

The artist’s current ceramic work grew first from a series of paintings and drawings of the post-industrial ruins that remained on the south-eastern side of San Francisco close to where the artist grew up–as a means of both documenting the liminal spaces that he had become so attached to and as a sort of love letter to the fragility of a city that was changing faster than he could comprehend. What began as paintings and drawings soon morphed into more freeform ceramic interpretations–fragile architectural relics, cavernous haunted forms and precariously leaning towers which began populating a new imaginative space in which Makanna was able to explore these ideas with greater freedom. The movement into the medium of ceramic also intimately connected the artist within a lineage and a tradition particular to the Bay Area that had taken clay from its confines in craft and transformed the medium into a prominent fixture of contemporary art. As Makanna continues to create and explore this unfolding landscape of precarious ruins or “Runes” as he’s taken to calling them, his conceptual intent has continued to shift to where he know envisions these structures as markers of a forgotten empire–a sentiment without a doubt influenced by the end of days climate that surrounds our impending political and environmental crises.